And no, I'm not rebuilding my computer for linux, you would not be the first person to point out that I should replace my Nvidia GPU with an AMD one.
I will note though that GNOME is one of the nicest DEs I've ever used, at least back when graphics acceleration worked. Trackpads finally seem to be a first-class citizen, something Apple has already been doing for almost two decades (and, in fact, it's an Apple trackpad that works quite well with it).
It worked fine until that happened and basically made it unusable since I don't have an iGPU.
Maybe I'll try some other Fedora, or just go back to X11 on Arch, which worked well enough.
In 5 years I've had 2 family support calls: one to setup a new WiFi on a Chromebook and one for turning the Chromebook on and off.
This clearly invalidates your point, and supports "Linux would be either painful or more realistically a no go", because it's obviously not enough for some relatives to be able to easily use Linux - most of them need to be able to. The fact that you have more capable-than-normal relatives or more Linux-friendly-than-normal hardware is irrelevant to the fact that most people do not.
All he needed was a web browser, an email client and a word processor. And that's it. So Lubuntu did the job perfectly.
Obviously more expectations may be harder to meet
It's not enough for some people to be able to use Linux - if you want to recommend it for general use, it has to be usable for almost everyone.
